WordPress Spam: Blacklisting Words

One of the angriest insults ever to be thrown at a blog post is for the blog post to be referred to as spam. That’s an insult to something that is meant to be shared and written by someone who was undoubtedly passionate about it. There are insults like spam and there are spam as nuisance.

Of course, in WordPress, along with other blogging sites, spam are already a form of nuisance that is more and more becoming a part of a blog’s life. On blogs, they are generally to be found on the blog’s reply list, as if the writer as well as the readers would be delighted of having to read spam. Of course, no one can blame anyone for advertising his product, but what the blogger can do is to report these spam to WordPress by listing the spam words used.

WordPress, conveniently, stores all of the taglines used by the spammers thereby making the words reentry virtually deleted. Now it may look as if that’s the perfect weapon against spam. It is not as spammers are also human beings, and they are able to devise new taglines that are still allowed.

As an offset to this, WordPress allows the users to blacklist words, but caution must be exercised here as it is still an imperfect system to begin with. For example, if a word like ‘hit’ was blacklisted, all future words containing ‘hit’ even if just part of another different word would ultimately be blacklisted. So again, choose caution on doing this.